How my chronic back pain was healed by bubbles🫧 and rainbows 🌈

I held back on sharing how my chronic back pain was healed because I wanted to give it some time to make sure it was real. But now I need to share 🧠🌈🫧✨

Note: My intent isn’t to share some sort of miracle cure here, but rather my personal experience, which for me very much felt like a miracle.

History of my back pain

In my late teens, I had a wakeboarding crash that compressed my spine in my lower back. It wasn’t a terrible crash that needed hospitalization or anything, but it kept me moving slowly for several weeks, with a debilitating sharp pain in my lower back. This eventually went away, and I forgot about it.

Until a year or so later when it returned, as a sharp pain in my lower back that was debilitating for several days again. Then again, it went away.

This pain came and went every year or so, and I tried to manage it with core strength exercises and stretching as best I could.

Then a couple of years ago it came back with a vengeance, putting me on my back for an entire week and then never fully leaving, slowing me down in all aspects of my life.

Every single day my back hurt intensely when I woke up, when I leaned over, and I was starting to be terrified that it would just be something I’d need to live with.

I kept trying more things, like a lot more yoga, core strength training, acupuncture, and more. While these offered some temporary relief, nothing seemed to work.

I started to accept perhaps the sad reality that this might be a pain I’d just have to continuously manage and maybe one day surgery 😬

Enter Bubbles & Rainbow

I was hanging out with a friend, who also had similar back pain, and I asked him how it was doing, and he surprised me with his answer saying it was pretty much gone! I of course asked how, and he told me he read a book.

Wait, what?

I was skeptical but was willing to try anything. So, I immediately bought the book. It’s called The Way Out: A Revolutionary, Scientifically Proven Approach to Healing Chronic Pain, by Alan Gordon

This is going to sound very hippie-dippie, but those who are familiar with meditation and observing different emotions and feelings will relate.

In short, the vast majority of back pain is not necessary. It is a result of a misfiring in the brain that has been reinforced through negative association over days, weeks, and years, to get even worse.

Note, that this does not mean the pain is not real, nor does it mean that this is the case for all types of pain. For example, if you break your arm, that is structural pain, and that’s real. But the body is better at healing than many of us believe, and in most cases, pain shouldn’t linger as long as it does.

Furthermore, I am by no means saying this will work for you or your type of pain, all I can say is that it has worked for me and changed my life.

Here’s how I do it.

When I feel back pain, instead of fearing it, I calm my mind and observe it. Is it sharp? Is it throbbing? Is it moving around? I really try and observe it and understand it, but don’t judge it. As with judgment comes fear and reinforcement of the negative brain-body pathway.

Instead, I think of happy, comfortable things. And in my case, this has been bubbles, rainbows, and pillows 😀 Feelings of softness and color.

Sometimes this did nothing and was just an exercise, but it didn’t take long and the pain would dissipate or disappear altogether in that moment!

My mind was blown. And still is. 🤯

I continued to practice this for a couple of months before my back pain was pretty much completely gone!

This was a profound experience for me, first, because it was even possible, and second because it highlighted my absolute lack of understanding of the impact that the brain can have on the body.

And if this really does work on a mass scale, which it does according to the studies, why is it not more commonly practiced or discussed?

Two out of two people that I know who tried it were successful, and again, I’m not saying this will be successful for others, but given how miserable chronic pain is, it seems to be worth a shot for many.

Hopefully, this approach continues to work, but for now I’m pretty excited about it!

Do you have chronic pain? How do you manage it? Have you ever tried this approach?